Only mere whispers and mutterings throughout our history hint at the existence of one of the most mysterious, cryptic, enigmatic and… secret American artifacts. It is a secret book, kept by every President, that holds every secret United States secret in the history of crazy secrets. Its name: The President’s Book of Secrets. And getting his hands on it is the only way that secret-hunter Benjamin Gates can clear his family name, which has been recently marred by the discovery that his great-great grandfather allegedly planned the assassination of President Lincoln. In secret.

But good god, how is he going to do it? He has one option, and one option only: he’s going to kidnap the President. Clearing the name of his long-dead great-great grandfather is obviously more important than whatever else the President has going on.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present National Treasure: Boooook of Secretsssss, coming to a theater near you this Christmas.

I think that when, the Coen Brothers are on their game, they're as good as any filmmakers on the planet. And novelist Cormac McCarthy is, to me, as close to a national treasure as we've got these days. (If you don't believe, just read his most recent novel, The Road.) So when the Coens' most recent film, an adaptation of McCarthy's Western neo-noir No Country for Old Men, received rave reviews after its Cannes premiere, I got excited.

Then, when I saw this trailer, I got really, really excited. Let's hope that in 2007, Oscar season actually means some great films, and not just "prestige" mini-major hype jobs. Based on some of the trailers that have surfaced in the past month or so (most notably There Will Be Blood), my hopes are kind of high.

For now.

Now that the technology for producing high-quality special effects isn't confined to Skywalker Ranch, web series set in space are more possible than ever. But how many of them promise to be interesting character-based dramas as well? Well, there's at least one, if Shane Felux's Trenches lives up to the promise of its trailer.

Focusing on the front-line drama of an intergalactic war, the special effects are tight and the actors engaging -- the perfect solution for all those Battlestar fans jonsing for a fix. In short, it looks like Starship Troopers, without painfully fascist -- and it was produced on a shoestring budget by Stage 9 Media. We'll have more about this when it premieres this fall, but in the meantime just start getting excited.

Zowie. Robert Zemekis follows up his motion-capture family extravaganza The Polar Express with the motion-capture fantasy spectacular Beowulf. The fact that those two projects are bookended by the basically-one-man-show Cast Away and the planned motion-capture remake of A Christmas Carol start to make you think maybe Zemekis just doesn't like working with live actors all that much. But this project looks mighty damn cool.

With the increasing dominance of CGI in the fantasy film genre, it's amazing no one's really run with this concept before. Mo-capping the actors gives them the same visual texture and intensity as the backgrounds and effects, making the whole world blend together seamlessly. It's really pretty gorgeous.

And to those who say mo-capped actors look plastic and creepy, I say puh-leeze. Like Angelina Jolie didn't already look like a goddess crafted from Sculpey anyway.